When COVID Kills the Glamor of Flight Attendants

East Asia is known to worship flight attendants. Chosen to be young, beautiful, and cosmopolitan, it is a group of people that many young women aspire to be a part of, and many men look forward to meeting when they are on planes, and date when they are off. The blatant objectification of flight attendants, as I argued in an opinion piece back in 2017, holds back efforts to advance gender equality and to allow people to have a realistic view of what flight attendants essentially are: overworked servants in cramped spaces that have been over-glamorized by society in a way that attract applicants to an otherwise unglamorous job.

The COVID pandemic has pretty much put paid to the idea of a flight attendant job as being glamorous. With many regular flights permanently canceled until the still unknown end of the pandemic and restarting of regular international travel, flight attendants without regular duty have been compelled to seek different career options that supposedly leverage their training. Multiple media outlets have reported on flight attendants using the empathy and spirit of service they learned while flying in the sky in other people-centered service positions, whether it be in nursing homes, schools, or client management and sales roles.

In the process of the flight attendants developing alternative careers, it is interesting to see that where they often ended up has very little to do with the sort of glamor that people assigned to them when they were still in the sky. There is no doubt that just like flight attendants, people in many people-centered service jobs are required to be skilled at handling relationships, sometimes fraught, to build camaraderie and diffuse tensions, often with people being met for the very first time. But none of the alternative jobs grounded flight attendants have taken up to leverage their trained people skills effuses the connotation of beauty and cosmopolitanism associated with being flight attendants.

Indeed, as more media coverage of flight attendants doing other jobs emerge, readers get more and more of a sense that flight attendants, while better looking than average (largely because they are selected to be so in the first place), are no more skilled and unique in their skill set than the average teacher or caregiver. But plucking the flight attendants out of the sky and putting them in more "normal" service jobs, we as a society have inadvertently shown that they were not particularly worthy of worship that they commanded before. They have been taken off the pedestal that somehow, for decades, represented the epitome of feminine beauty.

That flight attendants became more "normal" in the eyes of the general public perhaps bodes well for the perception of airborne and especially international travel in the post-pandemic era. For a logical business reason, man airlines, travel agencies, and media outlets portrayed flying across borders as a source of glamor and cosmopolitanism, afforded to only those who are resourceful enough and intellectual enough to take in the experience. Travel, in this narrative, is not only a source of excitement about going somewhere new but also learning in a very physical way.

But people tend to forget that flying is ultimately a method of travel, no different from taking a bus, train, or taxi, none of which are seen with as much glamor as flying has been in the past decades. While it can be conceded the high cost of flying marks the exclusivity of the practice to the middle and upper classes, but the reality is that, as global migration increased in the past years and no-frills budget airlines emerged, the ranks of international travelers have been increasingly filled with millions of low-class migrant workers unhappily forced to leave their homes to make a living in other countries.

Hence, it makes sense for the glamor of flight attendants to wear off, even if COVID did not suddenly stop so many flights at once. Flights were becoming ever cheaper and accessible for all, commodifying international travel and making it less of an experience fitting for those with money or preexisting international connections. Flight attendants, in this world, no longer play the intellectual guides exclusively rubbing shoulders with the world's finest denizens, but just maintaining order and dishing out ready-made meals to the masses who increasingly think of flying as a normal process rather than something to be cherished in particular.

As flying becomes more normal and accessible for all, the aura of the flight attendant is bound to wear off, even if they are still chosen based on outdated requirements of physical beauty. That should be welcome for people when they once again get on flights to go somewhere after the pandemic blows over. The past year or so has worsened inequality to an unprecedented degree as those working from the comfort of their homes fail to empathize with those getting infected because they have not choice but to continue hustling on the streets. We do not need another reminder of inequality in the form of glamorous flight attendants pretending that they only deal with the rich.